Great, I always suspected a lot of the clients slowness (at least until certain things are cached in) had to do with it's resource management.
The client has memory leaks too.
It appears to be when fighting/skills happen. It could be as simple as just not freeing some game objects and effects, etc.
It has all kinds of stalls. I could probably run two "Dragon Age 2" games better then one Requiem client will run.
And the DA2 engine is obviously better even.
I'm glad you are doing this, but coming from a former game programmer I find it pretty comical that it takes someone else to fix their own client for them.
Really it should be the developer. And it shouldn't be that tough for them.
After all they have the source code and such.
They should just make a VTune (or some other profiler) build and find out where the stalls are.
Also for the memory leaks, I think they already have a custom allocator, and, or they should use one.
And make a special build that tracks all allocations with a time stamp and label/ID.
Then they could see what allocation(s) are not being freed.
When you zone currently at least it frees some of the memory, and would be be a great place for them to test.
Furthermore the graphics engine, and, or their use of it seems to be pretty poor.
They could have at least set it up to scale and give users better control of the graphics setting so that you could run the client on lower end machines.